What’s behind Allison Pearson’s sad obsession with Angela Rayner?

While Britain waits for a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer, the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson has already decided who she doesn’t want as Britain’s next PM.

In the past few days, Pearson – who once liked to call herself “the humble handmaiden of Brexit” – has launched a series of attacks on former Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. These include calling her “clueless Ange”, “a new low for Britain”, a “grifter” and “a gobby know-nothing in flappy trousers the colour of toilet cleaner”.

Pearson continued her attack on the Telegraph’s misleadingly named Planet Normal podcast, saying “something inside of me died the day Jeremy Corbyn made Angela Rayner, with her nurse NVQ1 qualification, left school pregnant, no other qualifications, he made her the shadow education secretary.”

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Something inside of Allison Pearson does indeed appear to have died, but these latest rants will be little surprise to anyone familiar with her obsessive dislike of Rayner. As Labour neared power, she could be found criticising Rayner’s grammar, calling on her and other oikish MPs to “speak standard English” and speculating nastily about how Rayner would look in the union flag dress once worn by Geri Halliwell.

More recently, Pearson has ramped things up, accusing Rayner of being “the ultimate DEI candidate”, “notable for sucking up to her male Muslim constituents”, and accusing of her sporting a “‘Barbie means business’ haircut and a power blow-dry to distract from the lack of grey matter beneath the Titian mane”.

What lies behind this unpleasantness? Perhaps Pearson, said to have become estranged from her Telegraph bosses in recent months, thinks this kind of name-calling will win them over. Perhaps she thinks it will get her a big-money move to the Daily Mail, where condescending meanness means big money.

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Or perhaps she has been triggered by memories of her unhappy schooldays. In a column riddled with sneering snobbery, Pearson told Telegraph readers that she considered Rayner typical of a class of working class “Angelas” who “sit in the back row of the class putting on make-up, doing their nails and chatting loudly, throughout readings from the set book, about who they’ve sh—ed. They disdain the teachers who are rather scared of them.”

She continued: “Angelas have sex by the age of 13 (they mock those of us who are saving our virginity for later). Pregnant at 16, they leave school without any qualifications and work behind the till in Mac Fisheries before embarking on a romantic life which features at least two injunctions and a restraining order. By the age of 37, they are grandmothers (as Rayner was).”

Meanwhile, if you are wondering about what kind of woman Allison Pearson considers a role model, here’s a tweet from last September:

“Lucy Connolly is not a racist. She is a far better mother and human being than Angela Rayner.”